


living as if it is our last life

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Justice League of America's Vibe (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Cisco Ramon-centric, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gen, Godlike Powers, Heroism, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, Reflection, cisco ramon was always vibe, superpowers and how to have them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 17:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15466587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Cisco wonders, sometimes, how he could possibly continue to live with all of this power at his fingertips.





	living as if it is our last life

**Author's Note:**

> Saw some people commenting on a friend's fic that Cisco being more powerful than pretty much everyone was unrealistic and then this happened, because it's absolutely _not_ unrealistic at all, and I'm tired of people (including the writers themselves) forgetting that Cisco is someone with literal godlike power.

Cisco wonders, sometimes, how he could possibly continue to live with all of this power at his fingertips.

To him, the world is like a spider’s web. Everything is branching out from him, the fragile vibrational tendons of the universe hooking around his fingertips and whispering secrets in his ear. Everything from the dying dates of planets to the words inscribed on the rocks at the Vanishing Point to the stories of him and his friends, penned down through the ages by people who never want to forget about heroes.

He dreams, too often, about his friends and family meeting their end. He sees Iris surrounded by more family members than he could ever count in a million years, he sees Barry crumbling away to nothing as the world dies, he sees Cindy struggling to get up again and again as skeletal hands grasp at her, he sees Caitlin and a man he has never seen save the smallest world there is, he sees Wally fade out like a bad photograph, he sees Ralph and the devil and a wishing gun and a bloody wedding ring, and-

Cisco takes Barry’s hand, one day, and feels the lightning snake up into his wrist. The speed force sings in Barry’s veins, and Cisco can feel it doing so. It whispers to him, too, secrets about how to unfold it and tear it apart, how to tap deep into its siblings, into strength and sage, into stillness, into everything about the universe. Barry doesn’t feel that yet. He doesn’t have to. Cisco can feel it for him.

Barry likes to tell him that he doesn’t have to be afraid of his powers. Cisco’s not sure how to tell him that he stopped being afraid of them a long time ago. That he stopped being _himself_ a long time ago. He holds on for the sake of his friends, but he’s really something else. Something bigger than all of them, even the Kryptonians. It’s not arrogance. He _hates_ that that’s how powerful he is, even if he no longer fears what he can do. It’s simply a statement of fact.

But… He likes to be reminded that he is still human. He sees it every time he vibes something else about his friends. When he vibes and sees Barry holding his children for the first time, when he sees Iris kissing her grandson’s forehead, when he sees Caitlin sitting sitting alone and comfortable in the sun, drinking up warmth, when he sees Wally and his future lightning rod, when he sees the family Ralph is going to find one day, when he sees how Jenna will grow up, when he sees Cindy free of her mother for the first time.

That’s the thing about having unimaginable power strumming through every breath you take and vibrating inside your lungs. It can tear you apart if you let it. Cisco knows all of those futures could overwhelm him. They could stick in his head and make his life worse and worse with every passing day. And they do, sometimes. It’s hard to tell what’s reality and what’s not even on what Cisco would consider an okay day. The _bad_ days are worse. The bad days are more than just the times when he sees the end of it all.

But on the bad days he has people who care about him. On the bad days he isn’t alone with his thoughts of the future and what it holds for him.

Barry and Iris almost always come over together. They sit with him and they put on a movie and let him hold them and tremble like he’s afraid that if he opens his eyes they’ll be nothing more than grasping corpses with black lights behind their eyes, soul-sucking and grasping for the heart in his chest. He doesn’t want to see it coming when his best friends turn into monsters. When he himself becomes one.

Wally comes over and builds things with him. Tiny cityscapes and to-scale models of the _Enterprise,_ fully working vibe goggles that he lets Cisco destroy, gauntlets made for absorbing and redirecting sound, handcuffs for trapping metahumans, even the slippery ones, and bracelets with tracking devices inside. Wally tells him how things are going between him and Linda. Between him and Jax. Cisco doesn’t have to say anything, not if he doesn’t want to. Wally fills the silence for them both. It’s nice.

Caitlin brings food. Stuff from the Thai place down the road from Cisco’s apartment, food from the tiny deli on her side of town, burritos and rice and fresh fish and cheese they can melt to make fondue and rye bread and cherries and cartons of ice cream and donuts and hot soup. Sometimes she tries to make him talk about how he’s feeling. About what he’s seeing. He never does. She always gives up after a little while.

Cindy’s visits are more secretive. Shorter, usually. He’ll come out of the shower and she’ll be waiting for him in his bed, the vibrations that match his perfectly open and inviting because he can’t keep secrets from her and he never has. They lay together and she tells him stories of dead Martian gods and boys with glowing eyes and trafficked metahumans saved by a hunter and what it feels like to taste the stars.

Even Ralph came over to visit twice. The first time it was one of the worst days, though, so Cisco doesn’t remember what really happened all that well, just that he’s pretty sure he told them about the kids and then passed out on their lap which trapped them for about eight hours. The second time they brought food like Caitlin. Not homemade, thank god. Apparently Barry recommended a place.

The bad days are hard. The bad days the vibrations weigh too heavily on his body and it’s like the world is folding over on itself. The bad days remind him of all the evil in the world. Of all the evil _inside_ him. Cisco sees the worlds where he killed his friends, slaughtered them and everyone else until nobody was able to stand up and stop him. Cisco sees the worlds where he is happy, where both of his siblings are alive and he’s with a Cindy who seems to sing with hope, and he watches those worlds fall away to ash. Androids and Black Lanterns and crises and dark magic and the splitting of universes.

Nothing is good or happy anymore. Everything dies. There’s a sick sense of futility to everything he and his friends could possibly do. Does it even matter, if he can see a hundred futures where they succeed and nothing changes? If he can see a billion possibilities with completely and entirely useless outcomes? Why stop the Rogues’ latest attempt at a robbery when the Earth itself is dying? Why track down Thawne’s latest hideout when history will remember none of them as anything more than leaves in the wind?

Cisco is not afraid of his powers, not anymore, but there are times when he hates them. You don’t need fear to hate something. You just need anger and resentment and the feeling of being completely useless. Cisco knows he could vibrate the multiverse itself apart if he wanted to, he could pull on one single thread of many and unwind the whole thing like a sweater with a loose bit of yarn. And why not? If everything is so useless, so inevitable, why not do something like that? Something drastic that changes the foundation and the future of the multiverse itself?

But… then there are the good days. The wonderful days where his powers feel like a blessing. When he breaches just in time to save a child from a burning building, where he moves just fast enough to pull a bystander out of the way of a meta attack, when he brings someone with godlike power (but what god can stand up to him, anyway?) to their knees for the good of the world.

Those are the days when it is even better to have friends, even if it is not as useful. Those are the days when Cisco realizes that maybe people won’t remember brave Barry Allen and bold Wally West, but they will remember the Flash. Those are the days when Cisco realizes that nobody will remember Cindy Mordeth, but they will remember the people that led their world out of a decades long dictatorship. That the world won’t remember Ralph Dibny, but old gods will forget nothing, and they were the first to care for their young vessel in a long, long time. That their world won’t remember Caitlin Snow, but the microverse will sing songs for eternity about the icy champion that their savior believed in. The world won’t remember Iris West or Linda Park, but it will always have lightning rods.

Perhaps, a million years from now, nobody will know the name Cisco Ramon. But maybe there will be legends about the man who held the multiverse together, who did no great act of bravery by choosing not to take lives by ripping the universes apart at the seams, but simply _was._ Who simply _did._ His energy as constant as the multiverse itself, as his unusually long lifespan shortened by the millisecond.

It is good to have friends. People who support him during the bad days and let him revel in what he can see for them on the good days. People to remind him that he’s more human than god. That there will always be someone to bring him back down to Earth again, someone to promise him that he is not alone. That he doesn’t have to do this by himself. Even on the good days when he knows that things will be alright, one day. Someday.

There is godhood in Cisco’s veins, vibrating in time with the frequencies of the multiverse. There is the promise of power in his future and the safety of weakness at his back. He has his friends. He has his family. He has all of this power and a thousand universes that needs him to use it to save people, to stop the walls of everything from collapsing and condemning billions of innocent lives.

Cindy and Breacher’s powers don’t work like his do. Breacher’s are closer than Cindy’s, but still not quite there, which means that _he_ is the only one who can do what he does in the multiverse. Cisco and all his thousands of doppelgängers, working to protect different things. Some choose smaller destinies. To protect their families and their children instead of cities and worlds and universes. Some think even bigger, to what is outside of the multiversal walls. And none of them are the same. But it is close enough for Cisco to know them like he knows himself.

Cisco smiles and stretches his fingers up through those spiderwebs only he can see, twisting his fingers through them and pulling them down in toward himself to let the speed force flow more freely through Wally’s body. This is what he was meant to do. This is how things were meant to be. This is how he was supposed to live. This is who he was always supposed to be.

Nothing is forgotten in the Firestorm Matrix. In the speed force and in its cousins. And nothing will be forgotten by Cisco. The multiverse has spaces just his size for him to exist in. Nothing less. Maybe someday he’ll be something even more. There are people out there like the Kryptonians who are worshipped as gods for being less than him. Of course he doesn’t hold it against them. They consider themselves to be more powerful than anyone. And they usually don’t want the worship that comes with their existence on an Earth with a yellow sun.

Cisco leans back in his chair and lets the vibrations trickle through his fingers like water flowing through a stream as he closes his eyes so no one will see the gold and silver glow as he taps into that powersource. He’s comfortable, for now, with letting everyone underestimate his abilities. With low-level metas comfortably putting themselves on the same level as him and forgetting that Reverb said he could be a god. Reverb was wrong about that, anyway-Cisco already was one when he offered. He simply hadn’t realized it yet.

But even now that Cisco knows it, he doesn’t want things to change between him and everyone else. He’s happy to pretend that his powers have fully blossomed at a low level, that he’s no multiversal power. Now that Harry’s gone, it’s easier, because Cisco doesn’t feel like he’s going to snap and rip him limb from limb if he doesn’t shut up and leave him alone. He really wasn’t as smart as he always thought he was if he couldn’t tell Cisco was more powerful than anyone thought.

Cindy knows, because she can feel every breath he takes. Breacher knows, because he’s the closest Cisco has right now to an equal in ability. Dante knew, because they used to tell each other everything because they were the only people they could trust. But Barry, Iris, Caitlin, Wally, Ralph, Joe, Cecile, Jesse… They don’t know. He doesn’t want them to know, not yet, not until he has to reveal himself and the power he can harness to them.

It’s not selfish. He’s still using it to save people even if he hasn’t shown it off to his friends yet. He’s still doing good things and fighting the good fight in his own way. It’s just more of a secret than his younger self, who dreamed of being a superhero and making sure no little boy had to lose his oldest sibling and his whole world along with them again, would ever have expected it to be. Of course there’s the urge, when someone downplays what he can do and calls him useless like so many other people have before, to show off that he’s really stronger than any of them. But he doesn’t follow it. Why would he? He knows he doesn’t really want to be a god in the way that every supervillain seems to.

Cisco’s just himself. There’s nobody he’d rather be, which is a change from most of his life, when he wanted to be anybody except himself. When he hadn’t been able to imagine feeling comfortable in his own skin the way he does now. Now he feels the space where he belongs. Now he knows this is who he is. And… He’s okay with that. He’s just fine with being himself and nobody else.

This world needs him in it. It’s not selfishness or arrogance. He’d sacrifice himself to save his friends or even a stranger in a heartbeat. But the world needs him and the multiverse requires people like him to be who they are. Which means he kind of has to like himself. And having to made it actually true. For pretty much the first time. Hell, he _loves_ himself.

Cisco loves himself and he loves his friends even more, and that’s how he knows things are going to be okay for the world itself one day. You don’t need to be able to see the future to know that. It won’t be okay all on its own, but Cisco can shape it. Pull on one of those thousands of threads and make _sure_ that everything is alright in the future, for those generations of heroes that he can see off in the distance getting ready stand up for people.

Cisco wonders, sometimes, how he could possibly continue to live with all of this power at his fingertips, and then he gets up and brushes himself off and keeps living anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm danteramon on tumblr.


End file.
